I Am Not Supposed To Be Here
Kate Dendrinos-Rickel, Shawn Rickel and Steve Marsh

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Following are excerpts from the book:

Chapter 1: The Accident

For an instant, Shawn believes he blacked out. When he returned to consciousness, he felt a surge of pain shoot through his body like the jolt of grabbing a live electrical wire.  The bike fishtailed to the left, and Kate held on with all she had. They hit the back bumper of the truck, knocking off their right-side saddlebag. The bike wobbled out of control. The force of the collision caused Kate to lose her grip on Shawn. She flew off the bike and landed in the street several feet east of the intersection.

As the motorcycle slid out from underneath him, Shawn catapulted over the handlebars of the bike. When he hit the pavement, Shawn covered his head and slid forty feet. He heard the motorcycle’s mirrors shattering as the bike flipped three more times, the engine downshifting with each crack against the pavement.  Fredo, still on his bike, perceived the accident in slow motion. He watched in terror and disbelief as Shawn’s body shot past him and slid along the pavement. Fredo quickly stopped his bike while screaming, “Shawn! Are you okay?!”

When at last Shawn raised himself up, he had one thought: Where was Kate? He saw her lying on her back in the middle of the striping between the two eastbound lanes of Alameda. She wasn’t moving.
 

Chapter 2: Endless Interrogation

A marked squad car arrived on the scene along with the ambulance. A uniformed Denver police officer surveyed the site, and then talked to Shawn and Fredo as the ambulance whisked Kate away to a downtown hospital.

Shawn and Fredo told the officer about the elderly woman who had illegally turned in front of them. Witnesses to the accident said that the white truck disappeared before they could get close enough to see identifying plates or markings. The accident had become a hit-and-run crime scene.

A split-second disaster quickly turned into a living nightmare for Shawn—one he couldn’t escape. All he wanted to do was get to Kate’s side, but there were questions to answer and affidavits to complete. After Shawn and Fredo gave their report to the uniformed officer, the Denver Police Department investigative team arrived, and they would not let Shawn leave. Strangely, the detectives did not receive either the report from the first officer on the scene with information from witnesses about the truck that had caused the accident or Shawn’s and Fredo’s statements.

FREDO:
A uniformed cop had us sit down at the corner and fill out paper work. He was the only one who knew there were two bikes. Later, detectives showed up and started their investigation. I was hanging back, watching a detective go over the skid marks. He was combining the skid marks of both bikes, thinking the marks belonged to one bike—Shawn’s. I pointed this out to Shawn, and Shawn later tried to explain it, but the detectives were just ignoring what he was telling them. They didn’t want to hear what he had to say.

While one of the investigators surveyed the scene, the other talked to Shawn. The investigators kept Shawn at the scene of the accident questioning him over and over about the details.

Chapter 5: We Can’t Wait

Shawn’s cell phone rang as he drove from his townhouse to the hospital and threaded his truck in and out of the Tuesday morning, rush-hour traffic. Something about the phone number looked familiar. When he realized it was the ICU calling, he started to feel queasy. The nurse on the other end of the line said that Kate’s intracranial pressure, or ICP, had suddenly spiked. Her remaining brain tissue was now pushing its way through the top of her skull, and it would kill her. The nurse went on to say the only procedure that could save her life required the removal of a “bone flap,” a piece of skull roughly the size of a hand.